The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 550

Liora’s POV

We buried my mother at the beginning of summer and planned my wedding at the end of it.

My father laid her to rest in her uniform. Black fabric, black star on the shoulder, every medal pinned over her heart where the whole kingdom could finally see them.

The stories got out within a week, the way stories always do, and by midsummer there were children in the capital playing Spy Queen in the alleys, taking turns being the woman who took a witch off the highest tower in the palace.

She would have hated it.

I went to her grave every Sunday and told her about it anyway, along with everything else. We talked more that summer than we ever had while she was alive.

I tried not to dwell on that part.

The rest of the season was spent buried in trials and paperwork. Falcon’s Reach passed to a distant cousin of mine, far more distant than Ambrose, a kind woman who planned to turn the castle into a home for herself and her family. The school reopened in July, scrubbed clean. Alder got a cell with one small window.

Callum’s mother got a courtroom.

She never looked at her son. Not once, not even when he took the stand. When the verdict came down, she thanked the judges for their time like she was excusing herself from a dinner party, and the guards led her out, and that was that.

Callum didn’t sleep right for a week afterward. I didn’t push him to talk about it. I just left the balcony doors open at night, and we sat out under the stars until the worst of it passed, my head on his shoulder, the bond humming low and steady between us.

By August, the abdication papers were signed, sealed, and sitting in my father’s desk, waiting on one last thing.

Me.

The morning of the wedding, I woke alone to warm sunlight and a palace already in motion. Tradition had banished the groom to the east wing for the night, although he’d snuck in at some point anyway, at my request, of course.

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